Azure Cobalt 100 is our in-house, custom-built, Arm-based cloud CPU powering general compute workloads in the cloud. Cobalt 100 systems are designed to deliver high performance, energy efficiency, and cost effectiveness for a wide range of workloads. Cobalt 100 systems have been live for nearly a year and now available in 29 Microsoft datacenter regions globally, delivering meaningful results and benefits to Azure customers across industries.
Cloud analytics leaders like Databricks and Snowflake are adopting Cobalt 100 VMs to support their data platforms. These companies handle massive volumes of data and rely on scalable infrastructure to deliver real-time insights and machine learning capabilities. The balance of compute power and energy efficiency offered by Cobalt 100 VMs makes it an ideal choice for large-scale data processing.
We continue to see adoption of Cobalt 100 VMs from customers who are achieving real world performance and efficiency gains:
“At OneTrust, we’re constantly optimizing our platform to deliver scalable, high-performance solutions for AI-ready governance. The Azure Cobalt 100 VMs represent a major advancement in cloud infrastructure, and we’ve seen meaningful improvements in throughput and efficiency during our evaluations. Microsoft’s innovation in Arm-based architecture enables us to better serve our global enterprise customers with faster, more cost-effective services.”
— Steve Finch, VP of Architecture & Ops, OneTrust
“At Siemens, we’re committed to pushing the boundaries of silicon verification performance. By adopting Azure Cobalt 100 VMs, we’ve achieved up to a 20% performance boost in our Questa One DFT simulations – accelerating fault and formal verification cycles across analog, memory, and digital workloads. This leap in efficiency empowers our teams to deliver faster, more reliable results for one of the most complex designs in the industry.”
– Abhi Kolpekwar, VP & GM, Siemens EDA, Siemens Digital Industries Software
“We conducted extensive benchmarking of the new Cobalt 100 VMs for containerized application workloads running on AKS and observed measurable price-performance gains compared to Azure’s previous-generation Arm-based VM series, with improvements evident across both throughput and cost-efficiency metrics. Following these results, we have migrated 70% of our AKS workloads to Cobalt 100 VMs and are in the process of migrating the remaining 30%.”
— Gopala Krishna Padidadakala, Sr Director of Cloud Engineering, Sprinklr
“Temenos is proud to set a new industry benchmark for scalable, AI-powered banking on Microsoft Azure, leveraging the breakthrough performance of Cobalt 100 VMs. The combination of Temenos’ cloud-native platform and Azure’s Arm-based Cobalt 100 VMs allowed us to achieve over 40% efficiency improvement compared to the 2024 benchmark exercise, enabling banks to run demanding workloads with greater efficiency and sustainability. This collaboration empowers financial institutions to innovate faster and scale securely, transforming the future of digital banking.”
— Eugene Khmelevsky, Head of Architecture and Data, Temenos
Microsoft’s own services are also benefiting from the adoption of Cobalt 100 VMs. The deployment of Cobalt 100 VMs for Microsoft’s services demonstrates its ability to support large-scale, mission-critical applications.
Microsoft Teams has achieved up to 45% better performance using these VMs than previously possible. Teams is a latency-sensitive application that serves millions of users worldwide, and the ability to process requests more efficiently has a direct impact on user experience. The media processor capability in Teams—supporting audio/video streaming—runs on Cobalt 100 VMs with lower compute footprint. That translates to resource reduction of up to 35% fewer compute cores needed for the workload. Cobalt 100 VMs unlock exceptional efficiency, empowering teams to achieve more, faster, with fewer resources.
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE) is a cloud-native security service with hundreds of microservices that perform threat detection, data analysis, and protection at massive scale. We have seen 40% better performance in MDE’s cyber data curator, running on Cobalt 100 VMs. Curator groups high-volume data into partitions in real time for fast, scalable processing. Faster processing and higher throughput translate to better user experiences, including faster threat response in MDE.
These results underscore the value of Microsoft’s approach to architect and develop customized infrastructure; Cobalt 100 is not just a new type of general compute VM, but one of the most optimized compute products in Azure. Whether it’s accelerating product development, scaling analytics platforms, or improving user experiences, customers are finding that the combination of performance, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness makes Cobalt 100 VMs a compelling choice for modern cloud workloads.
Cobalt 100 demonstrates Microsoft’s end-to-end systems strategy in practice. By designing the CPU in-house and optimizing it for Azure’s infrastructure, Microsoft has created a tightly integrated infrastructure that delivers consistent performance across a variety of cloud scenarios. This approach allows for better control over power consumption, thermal management, and workload distribution, resulting in a powerful and efficient cloud environment.
As more organizations look to modernize their infrastructure and adopt cloud-native technologies, the demand for highly performant and energy-efficient compute resources will continue to grow. Azure Cobalt 100 VMs are well-positioned to meet this demand, offering a scalable and sustainable solution for a wide range of applications.
By delivering faster, more efficient computing, Azure Cobalt 100 empowers organizations to push the boundaries of what’s possible with better price performance across industry use cases in their respective fields.
- Start your journey on Cobalt 100 VMs – try today!
- Check out the Cobalt 100 panel from Arm and Azure at Microsoft Build 2025.
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